[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURxTRZmNAgSKk5tsnscXszlWM66SkOI-[/youtube]

To be honest I think most of YouTube is just Bad. I’m probably just awful and pedantic and it sounds really arrogant but I’m just not that into most popular media. And like we were reading, YouTube is all about popular. Of course there are niches for everyone, and there’s tons of stuff on YouTube that I really enjoy. It was really difficult for me to put together 15 videos from YouTube, mostly because I was trying to get a range of different types of videos. I don’t really go on YouTube to find videos that much, mostly I just get there from links, and I only care about the regular uploads from maybe one channel, so it’s harder to find things that I care about or even really know how to find them. The main things are Mountain Goats songs, video games, and animation.

Probably the biggest thing  I use YouTube for is looking up Mountain Goats songs. So, I’m a little bit obsessed with the Mountain Goats. They’re a folk rock band that have been around since the early 90s, and for a long time it was just one guy, John Darnielle, plus sometimes some of the musicians who are around him. Since they’ve been around for so long, and since Darnielle produces an absurd amount of music, they have maybe over 500ish songs. And though I’ve done my best, I certainly haven’t heard a lot of them. He’s released a lot of songs once, years ago, in the band’s forums, or only on the Japanese album, or on a tape, so YouTube is the only place a lot of these things are available to people who don’t want to spend absurd amounts of money on imports or limited cassettes. So I use YouTube a lot to just search for songs that I know, then find a bunch of songs in the related videos that I’ve never heard of before. One of the songs I put in the playlist (Used To Haunt) I’d never heard of before today. Anyway, that was a long winded way of saying that I wanted to make an entire 15 video playlist that was just Mountain Goats songs but figured that would be bad form.

I also use it for video game things. One of the videos I posted was Errant Signal, who’s just some dude who talks about games. His channel is probably the only one I really care about or keep up with. He mostly criticizes specific games, but also talks about different trends and aspects of games. The video I added was one about how video games are political no matter what their message is, and that common criticisms about video games being “too” political, or that people shouldn’t talk about feminism, racism, or queerphobia in relation to games, are all in themselves political, and just because something doesn’t push your boundaries or make you question society doesn’t mean that it isn’t furthering a political message. There’s also the HL2 commentary, which was made by some oil painter who has since disappeared off the internet, though his commentary is remembered by a surprising number of people as an important analysis of the game. The video I included is actually an “HD Remaster,” meaning that the dude who made it went and rerecorded each of the scenes from the original commentary (which was uploaded back when YT videos all looked like blurry messes of artifacts) and edited them all back in the exact same way to go along with the audio. The other video game stuff is a couple speedruns, one is an OoT one by Cosmo Wright, who’s one of my favorite speedrunners, and the other is from this year’s AGDQ, of some guys playing Tetris who are really good at Tetris. So, speedrunning is basically just trying to finish games as quickly as possible, which is surprisingly less boring than it sounds. AGDQ (Awesome Games Done Quick) is an event that goes on twice a year where a bunch of speedrunners get together and spend a week straight running a bunch of different games, while raising money for either cancer research or Doctors Without Borders. Mostly it’s just fun to watch people be really really good at a thing, especially when they’re breaking video games.

There’s also some animation, Bee and Puppycat, Manly, The External World, Baa, and the DyE music video. I don’t really know what to say about them other than I really just like animation especially when it’s pretty and creative. Then there’s a review of some knockoff PSP that plays awful games and has amazing box text. The dude that does those reviews it is pretty unfunny but it’s cool to see a bunch of shitty knockoffs and bad toys they sell at dollar stores. I don’t really know why. And there’s that dog and wolf one which is just great. Amazing stuff. Sometimes I just spend hours watching this on loop and laughing at it. The last one is the docfuture one. I’m not sure what docfuture is doing with YouTube, but I like it.